Colin Firth admits he is struggling to lose his stutter

Actor Colin Firth has found himself unable to stop stuttering since playing
George V1 in The King’s Speech, he has disclosed.

Photo: Getty

By Victoria Ward

7:00AM BST 05 May 2011

Giving an interview to a London magazine, he suddenly lapsed into the voice impediment that had famously plagued the monarch for so many years.

“You can probably hear even from this interview, there are moments when it’s quite infectious,” he said.

“You find yourself doing it and if I start thinking about it the worse it gets, if nothing else it’s an insight in to what it feels like.”

Firth developed the stammer deliberately for the role, which earned him an Oscar award for Best Actor, but said co-star Helena Bonham Carter, who played his wife, Elizabeth, did her best to put him off whilst filming.

He said: “I’d known Helena for a very long time, and she’s fun, she’s quite filthy, she’s outrageous.

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“Whenever I was stammering if I caught her eye she was usually looking at her watch or yawning, hoping the moment passes as quickly as possible, fortunately when the cameras are on her she looks delightfully supportive.

“If I had to choose somebody to get stuck in the lift with she comes fairly high on the list because she’s amusing, attractive and very small."

Firth watched films of archive footage and became fascinated with how King George VI overcame the speech impediment.

He said: “I paid a lot of attention to those, not to impersonate, but to get what information I could about him. It was interesting to me, not so much what the stammer sounded like, but how he struggled against it. His job was to speak.”

On how he tried to develop the stutter, he added: “I can’t really go too much into what the technical thing was, and I don’t want to frankly. I’ve got myself to a place where I was really, trying, to speak and sometimes it felt that way.”